Standard Station

“It has to be called an icon,” Ed Ruscha has said about his depictions of Standard gas stations. In 1956, Ruscha’s obsession with the open road began while driving from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles for the first time at the age of 18. Driving back and forth on Route 66, he chronicled the various service stations between Hollywood and his hometown, releasing the photographic book Twentysix Gasoline Stations in 1963. Among these photographs, Rusha found inspiration in his snapshot of a Standard gas station taken in Amarillo, Texas, which featured a dramatic, angular composition. “There was something new and clean about it,” he recalled. “That gas station had a polished newness that I just had to draw and then paint.” Between 1966 and 2011, Ruscha would return to this photograph again and again, recreating the Standard Station in different mediums and colorways. Considered a signature work of the Pop art movement, Ruscha’s Standard Station can be found in the permanent collections of the …